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Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Wickerbird and the dense emotional storm of "in altar wine"

 









"wake up behold thee / lark in your clothing / that can't make it out / you found it boring / these waves all unmooring / ships in the sound...


There is a hazy sonic ambience to "in altar wine" by Wickerbird, the dream folk project of Mt.Rainier based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Black Cowan,  that feels like veiled memories from the past. The airiness here doesn't mean the impression is only ethereal. In the droning sounds, the shoegaze approach to the vast chorale of voices, percussive bumps that feel like a storm approaching and the pretty nimble guitars movements there is an emotional heaviness maybe of past loss or loss to come. 

The accompanying Official Lyric Video shows a pair of travelers against the majesty of nature and enjoying man-made creature comforts within nature's cathedral with the descriptor in the info section saying "Like a commercial for Patagonia or something, but the world's ending". 

Wickerbird's folk indie haze feels dramatic but I appreciate the subtle natural universe he builds, no thunderous timpani drums or Pink Floyd-esque bending electric guitars (at least not here) and I appreciate this approach. 

"in altar wine" off of Wickerbird's upcoming album, "The Sea Weaver".

-Robb Donker Curtius






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Wickerbird is the atmospheric dream-folk project of Blake Cowan, started in the wild foothills of Mt. Rainier. It began as a means of relating the understanding he found wandering the woods, told in distilled daydreams and wrought within the distant strands of tranquil, wistful guitars and cavernous, haunting harmonies.


His prior work includes The Crow Mother (2012), The Westering (2013) and The Leaf Maker (2015) — collections of music that are steeped in allegories of disillusionment and transition, casting personal insights under layers of natural metaphor and mythical imagery.

Where this past work concerned itself with forest-bound introspection, examining the forces of change in their capacity for growth, Wickerbird’s upcoming full-length record The Sea Weaver shifts its perspective outwards to the horizon, reckoning instead with the destructive aspects of change.

While his vantage remains lodged in those same diminishing natural spaces, The Sea Weaver instead explores his relation to the rapidly unraveling human context that envelops him and in doing so, contends with a haunted acceptance of being bound to its fate. It is a collection of threadbare elegies for the end, as overheard through the walls of a crumbling house.

With gauzy, liminal atmospheres, stark finger-picked melodies, reverberant choirs, and mythologized natural imagery, Wickerbird makes an accounting of what emotions remain – when the anger and fear of a stolen future have long burnt off.”


Wickerbird, folk indie, gothic, ambient, singer songwriter, melancholia, somber, stoic tones, nature, shoegaze, hazy tones, acoustic fog, "in altar wine", "The Sea Weaver",

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